By Vianna Davila
ProPublica, co-published with The Texas Tribune
Originally published May 9, 2023
Texas public records law allows officials to withhold police records if no one was convicted in a case. At least one city has used this rule to deny the release of suicide records. A new bill aims to close this loophole.
When Patty Troyan’s son Logan Castello died by suicide in November 2019 in his Central Texas home, she immediately tried to understand what prompted him to take his own life not long after getting married and days before a planned family Thanksgiving gathering.
But what she got back only left her with more questions. The city of Killeen’s legal department sent her 19 pages of police records, but almost every detail about what happened was redacted. No one told her that they suspected foul play, and there’s no indication that Castello was being investigated by police at the time of his death. …
Killeen officials denied Troyan the records by citing an exception in Texas’ public records law that allows law enforcement agencies to withhold or heavily redact police reports if a person has not been convicted or received deferred adjudication in the case. The rule was established in 1997 as a way to protect the privacy of people who were accused of or arrested for criminal activity that’s never substantiated.